Literary tourism: Brazilian literature through anglophone lenses

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of marketing and, in particular, media reviewing, in the creation of literary value and the circulation of literature by examining how the Brazilian literary landscape is framed through the lens of the anglophone press. A distinction is made between homogenizing, heterogenizing and exoticizing tendencies in the marketing of translated fiction. Brazilian literature is found to be sometimes exoticized, presented as a way of vicariously experiencing a remote culture; as a form, in other words, of literary tourism. Comparing the cases where the literature is exoticized to those where it is homogenized as part of the international literary canon helps us understand how cultural differences are mobilized in order to create an image of a “national” literature that appeals to the tourist gaze. Thus, this article reveals the precise mechanisms through which media reviewing can contribute to both the consecration but also the devaluation of national(ized) literatures.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazilian literature
• exoticism
• homogenization
• landscape
• book reviews
• world literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Gabriela Saldanha is a lecturer in translation studies at the University of Birmingham. She is co-author, with Sharon O’Brien, of Research Methodologies in Translation Studies (Routledge, 2013) and co-editor, with Angela Kershaw, of Global Landscapes of Translation, a special issue of Translation Studies. She is currently co-editing, with Mona Baker, a third revised and expanded edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Her main areas of interest are translation stylistics, art research and translation, the reception of translated literature and research methodologies. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Translation as Performance to be published in 2020 by Routledge.

Notes

1. The term “anglophone” is used here to refer to media – in particular, newspapers in English – and the readers who access it.

2. Only the Three Percent database includes titles from 2009 until 2015. LAF only surveyed 2000, 2005 and 2008, and the Index Translationum contains titles from 1979 until 2010.

3. I would like to thank Asimina Aktipi who assisted in the laborious collection of the data during her ERASMUS+ traineeship at the University of Birmingham, under my supervision.

4. All results from the Nexis database were included, independently of country of publication or type of newspaper. Therefore, any bias along those lines in the data presented here results from existing bias in the sources used by Nexis. Any clear patterns, such as the concentration on British quality press, are reported here.